Bloody Courage chapter 2
by Zack Gregson
Summary: After the whole debacle of the operation, Courage manages to keep himself steady to try and escape from the asylum, but facing other problems in turn.


**Chapter 2**

**Escaping the Darkness**

Courage had left the operating room as fast as he could and entered the cold stone halls. They were as dark as underground caverns, the air whooshing from all directions, carrying whispers, cackles and murmurs with it. He could hear, and even feel the other patients around him, all trapped in their own delusional problems. Trapped fighting themselves, or imaginary beasts, or overpowering negative emotions that manifested into beasts through twisted hidden nurturing over the years. Thankfully, the doors were not automatically run on the power, they were the old manual bolt-lock cells. The patients were inside.

Courage was safe from them, and they were unsafe to themselves.

The dog looked around the dark endless hallways, wanting someway to escape. Some door must lead to the exit.

He knew he was underground, due to the poor lighting and the wires running through the stone walls. That meant he had to find a staircase.

It took him all of 30 minutes to find one, after winding through dark corridors and having to deal with harsh whisperings of madness supported by the winds of insanity in these walls. He couldn't help himself standing still, rooted with fear every time he heard a noise, his ears shot up and his fur like porcupine quills. After the Bagg farm, he had learned not to always scream, but it was hard. So very hard.

When he found the staircase, he ran up it, desperate to leave the asylum somehow. His footsteps echoed throughout the winding staircase with a hollow series of clacks. He found a door at one corner of the stairs 4 minutes later.

When he opened it, he was relieved to find the ground floor, as indicated by a sign opposite the door saying "GROUND FLOOR" above the names of several other departments. Three halls with fake marble floors, brown tiled ceiling and the occasional plastic plant stretched out before him and to the left and right. The closest fire exit (as he saw from the hanging green neon sign saying FIRE EXIT with accompanying stick figure making a getaway) was to his left. So he headed that way.

He had headed down halfway to the exit when the lights had come on. Suddenly he felt the spotlight on him, like an actor trapped onstage, the lights flashing a trail along the floor in all directions the halls went. And then he noticed the number of people in the various rooms he passed by.

No guards he could find. A relief for him. Courage saw the fire exit door and smiled, seeing at as a true exit for him and from everything.

But...it wasn't. Normally after he had escaped from a building, he had the farm to go back to.

But...there was no farm...not anymore.

A Fire Exit...Fire...his head soon sank, hanging low onto his small stocky belly. if he left the asylum out of the fire, was he going out there only to get a frying pan to the face? His wake up call to reality was out there. Although reality had become very jaded for Courage.

But he had nothing to keep him here. He ran for the exit. The metal bar that a human would push to open the door was too high for him. Damn, he always forgot about his height.

Luckily, he saw a janitors' closet nearby. He opened it and grabbed a long sweeping brush. Walking back ungainly with it like a lance, he pushed the sweeping end vertically against the bar to open.

And at that point, the alarm that was triggered by opening the door was activated.

Of course, Courage didn't really care. They were going to discover his escape soon after he left anyway. He slipped out of the door and left the asylum at last.

The air outside was cold and dry, telling him he was in truly the dustbowl region of the USA. The land he saw was dark with a jagged outline like the jawbone of a maddeningly huge beast. He saw it was night time, the moon was not out and a few clouds scuttled carefully along the dark sky. The asylum behind him rang with the clamouring of a hundred voices like a battery farm. It looked like a castle to Courage from the ground, tall stone imposing building that was urging for a thunderstorm for truly classic atmosphere.

As he looked up at the ominous structure, he felt his head whine with pain, feeling sore as he looked up blearily again and-

_He was leaving. He knew he could not stay there any longer. No one could keep him anywhere. They said someone called Reepur would be the only one to look after him._

_"Only one who can keep him-"_

_"This has gone too far, we can-"_

_"Why my b-"_

He nearly collapsed from the sudden flashback. It was so strange for him. He felt himself in another time...or was it another place as well? Who were the people talking? What was it all about?

He even felt thoughts, other thoughts he never remembered having. He clutched his head feebly and got up from the ground, turning around from the asylum and walking forwards.

The dog looked lower down, and saw a straight path down towards the town of Nowhere. Essentially it was like a city really. It even had a church, which had its regulars every Sunday. But Courage was not religious.

If anything, he wanted sanity, not sanctuary.

Courage had trekked through the back streets of the town, avoiding the main roads in case the asylum called the military or the police, who had a powerful presence in Nowhere. He knew most of the alleyways by heart, been through his fair share of them in his younger days. He wasn't old in general. In fact, he was unsure of his age aside from being with Muriel and Eustace Bagg for several years. But he knew he hadn't hit middle age yet. He wasn't picky of his food and managed to scrape enough for his stomach to be sated at the most.

He wished he could taste Muriel's pies again. Those were beautiful pies. Made by only her...however did she do it?

No...stop it, you're torturing yourself Courage. But no matter what, he couldn't ever keep her from his mind. After all, the name Courage was given to him by Muriel, for a reason he could not remember. Perhaps it was a pitying shot to inspire some more confidence in him.

Or maybe she wasn't that bright.

Shut up...don't talk about her like that. He suddenly stopped and thought for a moment. Who was talking? No one was around, not even a hobo. He heard someone say something bad about Muriel. But...what if it was in his mind?

He couldn't know for sure. But it was in his thoughts somehow, that voice or whatever it was.

He shook his head and walked on, trying to think of somewhere to go. He only had Nowhere. What friends did he have?

Friends...he had acquaintances who he helped when some strange event had landed them at Nowhere. What he had met would be listed as insane automatically. He met small and mighty gods, voracious foxes, smoothly evil cats, genocidal fish, kingdoms of mythical creatures, squids from the stars.

And chickens...too many chickens for him to want to remember.

He remembered one chicken particularly well.

A red-eyed creature from space, that laid yellow and red polka-dot eggs that if ingested by the yolk, would turn one into a space chicken mutant. It integrated with the Earthen chickens, turned Eustace into one which Courage defeated as well as the space chicken himself.

Since then, they became arch nemeses. That was his first ever job of protecting the farm in the middle of Nowhere.

Muriel was eternally grateful to him for that, and for all the other times afterwards. Even for Courage's altruism of saving both her and Eustace, who abused him considerably, physically and mentally.

The things I did for love, muttered Courage, as he slumped against the wall, hidden behind a trashcan. He had saved many a creature, helped many others and defeated great evils. He was certainly a hero respected only by one sweet homely woman of Irish descent and simplistic humility. Courage could try as hard as he could to erase those two from his mind, but it was there...forever...until the day he died.

Half of him was somehow hoping for that day to come quickly. He felt his heart sinking further, his blood feeling like sludge of the sewers, filled with all manner of vile stuff and disgusting to look at.

He looked around himself, looking for some item to help him at this darkest time. He rummage in the trashcan, the clanging rattling throughout the night, and found a broken glass bottle. It still smelt of bitter alcohol which hit his nose like a whack from a boxing glove filled with spice. The sharp edges of the bottle glinted in the darkness, seeming to become beacons...beacons of escape for the dog.

I...I can't...Muriel wouldn't want that.

But he knew she could not be his moral light anymore...not anymore now, not after what he had done. How could he tell himself what Muriel would and would not want when he had committed sins to make her cry in pain for him regardless?

It would be good to be released, and see what would happen to his soul. He was tired of waiting now, he wanted to take the quicker way, he didn't care, nothing was left in this life now. He gripped the bottleneck in one paw and turning the sharp edges towards his chest, gripping now with the other paw, ready to plunge it into his heart like a dagger, into his little beating heart. He hated himself also for his heart being so...jumpy, so high on adrenaline that it made him run away, every single time.

As the sorrow sank into his mind and slowly filtered out all of his good memories, he sighed deeply, eyes closed before he pushed inwards.

And then a shuddering quake rippled through the ground. Courage was knocked off balance and the bottle slipped from his paws as he fell sideways to the ground. The rumbling became stronger, affecting the dog's vision as it jumped insanely in front of him.

Broken from his suicidal state, he felt the vibrations from further down the alleyway, back the way he came. Curiosity briefly grew over his fears and he headed towards the source of the shaking, his feet trembling from the vibrations as he hobbled awkwardly along the gravel stones.

And he came across a strange glowing circle on the ground. A blue circle, a small crater that shone like sapphire before him, illuminating his face halfway, his brow dark under the light from below. With a slight gulp of trepidation, he sneaked closer, hearing a strange shimmering kind of noise.

As he was halfway towards the crater, a small blue tentacle no thicker than his arm clambered from the hole.


End file.
